If 500 different people go to Amazon.com, they each a different version of the home page. How come? It’s personalized! It’s no secret why Amazon does that: content personalization makes money.
You have a landing page and plenty of traffic, but no one is clicking the submit button on your lead generation form. What gives?
If you’re like most people, your first instinct is to remove form fields to reduce friction. Sounds simple and, well, pretty obvious, right? If you want more people to complete your form, ask less of them. A best practice was born.
Every once in a while a big debate comes along in the conversion optimization industry. There was the carousel debate, the hamburger menu debate, the above the fold debate, etc.
Optimizers have been debating another question: Which mobile design is best for optimizers?
Is it m(Dot) design, responsive design, or adaptive design? All three options have their unique pros and cons as far as UX and SEO go, but which is most suitable for someone running experiments and tests on the regular?
Animation for the sake of “cool” can often hurt conversions since it’s distracting, but not always. There are four ways animation, when used properly, can actually strengthen user experience. And better user experience can lead to higher conversions.
You don’t need to overhaul your site to take advantage of animation. Just about any site can utilize basic animation in its loading sequence, calls-to-action, or navigation.
Website speed matters. Fast-loading sites perform better on all fronts: better user experience, higher conversions, more engagement, even higher search rankings. If you’re after mobile traffic (everyone is), site speed becomes even more important. No one wants to download a 4MB website on their smartphone, but most sites are that way. Your website can be different.
Ghost buttons are transparent calls to action found on websites and apps. They tend to have a thin border and a text label that sits within the transparent body of the button, thus the ghost reference. Ghost buttons are often used on websites with a minimalist or flat design.
Cialdini breaks down influence into six persuasion principles. What’s the best way to persuade somebody when talking to them? You have to be confident, talk fast, and swear a little, among other things.
But what about persuading somebody without words—possible?
According to Econsultancy, up to 30% of ecommerce visitors use internal site search. Due to the increased level of purchase intent from searchers, they’re known to convert up to 5–6x higher than the average non–site search visitor.
Site searchers account for up to 14% of all revenue, and case studies have shown increased conversion rates of 43% from site search optimization.
Yet how many sites pay attention to site search? Too often, it gets ignored. This post walks you through opportunities to improve your internal site search.
If you’re Amazon or Apple—congratulations! You don’t have any credibility issues. Most of us aren’t so lucky. Almost all but the biggest of companies have an uphill credibility battle every time a new visitor lands on their site.
Best practices are starting points: If you have no data, start with these. They are not what you should end up with, but they’re often where optimization begins. That’s an important distinction.
This post applies Jakob Nielson’s 10 Usability Heuristics to B2B websites that focus on lead generation (as well as “high consideration” B2C sites that lack any transactional functionality).